The thing that distinguishes a big messy public merger fight being waged by entertainment companies from the regular kind of merger fight between, like, electronics stores, is that very few people working for electronics stores are internationally famous. As such, it gets extremely easy for some very well-known people to start wading into the waters surrounding, say, Netflix and Paramount’s current pissing match about who’ll get to eat Warner Bros., and start throwing their weight around. Director James Cameron demonstrated that truth in a fairly pat fashion earlier this week, when a letter he wrote to the Senate stridently opposing Netflix’s purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery began making the rounds. Now actor Mark Ruffalo has also weighed in, attacking Cameron for his involvement. It’s like Oscar winner/nominee dominoes out here.
Ruffalo—who, to be fair, is basically never shy about voicing his opinions on anything—took to Threads this weekend to put his own spin on Cameron’s letter, asking (per Variety) if the Titanic director’s concerns about the antitrust issues raised by Netflix buying Warner Bros. Discovery aren’t just as striking if Paramount is the one that ends up schlorping the whole thing up. “I think the answer would be very interesting for the film community to hear and one that should be asked immediately,” Ruffalo added. “Is Mike Lee [a Utah Republican who chairs the Senate’s antitrust subcommittee] against the Paramount sale as well? Is he as concerned about that as he is the Netflix sale?”
Reading between the lines, it certainly sounds like Ruffalo is nodding toward some element of political favoritism at work here; Paramount is, after all, now owned by the Ellison family, who are about as friendly with Donald Trump as the billionaire set gets. (Republican critics of Netflix’s acquisition, meanwhile, have cited the company’s “woke” nature as a reason not to like it, while Paramount has already fast-tracked regulatory approvals for its own purchase of the rival studio.) For his part, Cameron has been a vocal critic of Trump—but he does have a movie with Paramount (his Billie Eilish concert film Hit Me Hard And Soft) coming out with the studio in the near future. (His letter didn’t mention Paramount at all, despite Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos accusing it of being part of the “Paramount disinformation campaign”; Cameron just seems to really, really dislike the idea of a streamer owning a major movie studio.) None of this, obviously, is going to get less messy as the Netflix sale continues shuffling forward, giving even more very famous people more time to weigh in; it feels like tribal lines are being drawn, as various camps decide which corporate kaiju they’re going to root for as they face off to see which one can shove Warner Bros.’ corpse down its maw first.
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